elfherself.bsky.social
I'm here for: Fanfic talk, lawsplainers, social media meta, paganism, scifi fandom, ttrpgs, indie publishing, and doc formatting.
The doc formatting community is especially weak but I have hopes.
792 posts
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128 following
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Did the survey ask people of other genders and races whether they self-censor at work? Whether they've lost job opportunities due to race and/or gender?
Because one data point does not make a statistic.
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They don't need 11 magazines. Should compile it all into one that covers the relevant information for all of them.
xkcd.com/927/
(Ahh, there's magazine #12…)
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Long-term solution is "buy a gaming tarot deck." But that takes a bit of money, and more importantly, the ability to track down a deck that
* You don't want to use as a spiritual tool
* Isn't a hokey parody deck
* Has artwork you like
* That you can use as inspiration with game prompts
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Secondary purposes: "I have acquired a bunch of #soloRPG games in a bundle and some of them use tarot cards. I don't have tarot cards." - or "I have a tarot deck and I am not using it for space disaster games. What can I do instead?"
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Main purposes: "We are playing a ttrpg and this adventure module needs us to draw some poker cards. Um. There's gotta be a deck of cards in this house somewhere, right?"
or, "Sure I can show you how to play RPGs! We just need some dice! Uh, no dice? I…guess we can use cards? Somehow?"
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Games that just need d6s:
* PbtA games (2d6) - includes Blades in the Dark, Monsterhearts, Thirsty Sword Lesbians
* GURPS (mostly 3d6 rolls)
* Fate uses d3s; you can use d6s for them
* Risus
* Lasers & Feelings
* More: forum.rpg.net/index.php?th...
* More: www.reddit.com/r/rpg/commen...
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You can contact them and bring it to their attention. Wranglers don't always notice when a tag has gotten big and coherent enough to be canonized. (Wranglers see their fandoms; they don't notice the non-fandom tags that sprawl across several of them.)
The admins are *busy* so it may take a while.
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Tags that aren't part of any particular fandom get wrangled differently - only tag wrangler admins can touch those, because if they get messed up it does bad things to the database.
So they get wrangled much, much slower.
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I understand worries about IP issues (copyright and trademark are likely both involved), but I don't get "I don't want people making more/different games out of my game. I don't want people playing my system unless they paid me for it."
RPGs have never been "every player buys all the books."
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The fix for that is, release an SRD.
Charge for it if you don't want it widely copied for free. (The system is still available to copy - but it's a lot harder to create a *second* SRD when you've seen the phrasing on the first one.)
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I edited/expanded a ttrpg resource booklet I'd published as a draft a year and a half ago. There's a game jam with a deadline in 3 days and I decided I want in, and happily spent several hours tinkering with fonts and margins and table layouts.
It is finally what I wanted it to be.
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I am twitching right now.
I have seen. so many games. that claim they aren't about combat.
But combat is a huge chapter with a whole lot of complex charts and 1/4+ of the character sheet is dedicated to combat-related numbers.
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The key to exclusivity is either sheer complexity (in which case, people will grab a few ideas and chop the system down to something that fits on a postcard) or flavor that ties the system to copyrighted elements that can't be grabbed.
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And mostly, that's a good thing. Ideas work best in a creative community playing with them in a multitude of ways.
There's limits on how much copying is allowed, but the concepts and system structure are outside of copyright.
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Games, fiction, code, videos, costumes, artwork - always a huge demand for "similar to whatever's most popular right now."
The creative arts have a long, long history of "take this core set of ideas, rewrite the surrounding structure, and package that for sale."
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"File the serial numbers off and republish with a twist" (or a pack of cliches pretending to be a twist) is a pervasive thing throughout the creative industries.
Some forms of it are legal (…how many vampire romances or wizard school series are on KU right now?); some fall into infringement.
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k-ramstack.itch.io/numbskulls
Numbskulls is a 2-pg RPG where pg 2 is the character sheet that includes a skeleton that you get to decorate/draw an outfit on.
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Does "modern style" mean "updated layout and art" or can it include "fixed the game system?"
I'd love a playable version of Midnight at the Well of Souls.
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The simple rules are balanced, AND the complex rules are balanced - but there's no balance if only some of the complex rules are in play, especially if the GM's side isn't using them to full effect.
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I have seen this backfire.
Players use the simple version at the start (e.g., no hit locations, just total hit points), until someone stumbles across aiming & damage bonuses for hitting vital areas.
Now one player is insisting on using the complex rules - but just the one part that he's good at.
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If D&D weren't suitable for casual players, it would've died out 40 years ago.
Okay, that was a different version by several steps. But. If each new edition didn't catch the attention of casual players, it would've died a few months after release.
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Not even "less experienced." A good starting adventure helps the players learn & understand the system, even if they're experienced players/GMs. Maybe especially for experienced players with dozens of systems crowding their heads—an adventure showcases the intended scope & playstyle for *this* one.
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There's no shortage of "system-agnostic" adventures; the intention of them isn't "write a system for this" but "play this in your system of choice" (presuming it works for the genre & general setting.)
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The line between "player" and "GM" gets pretty blurry in some games. (Esp solo games, also some gm-less games, maybe others.) What counts as a "player-character" can also be blurry.
The article has a good set of rules to consider about structure of rpgs, but is missing edge cases.
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It's a lot harder to figure out how that applies to solo games, especially ones with heavy journaling aspects.
I've considered that "solo rpgs" may not be "rpgs" and some of them may not be "games" in any coherent sense. But some feel very much like "solo variant of a ttrpg."
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Sounds like it's not "players can't author the gameworld" but "players can't author the gameworld without restrictions the way the GM can." Or, "Players are sometimes restricted from world-shaping; if they're never restricted, it's not an RPG."
Which may be his point but was too tangled to write.
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Also fairly clear in games where the GM role moves around. And the article acknowledges some of these.
I'm not sure of the value of a rule that says "These games require Restriction X, which can be mitigated based on other game rules."
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There are games where the players-of-characters author the world.
You can argue that they step out of the "player" role and into the "GM" role for that, and then step back into the "player role." This is established clearly in Fate, where the player "declares a story detail."
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Since the post that kicked this off said directly, "if a majority of what you design is systems you aren't a game designer," I don't think it's disingenuous for the discussions to focus on the topic of "what qualifies a person as a game designer."
It did not say "adventures are under-discussed."
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There are limits to the players' worldshaping; they can't declare a hundred of those details, and the GM can.
Fate is not the only game where players have world-shaping abilities, although it may be the most blatant about it.
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This is flat-out not true for all TTRPGs, even without getting into worldbuilding-focused GM-less games.
In Fate, anyone can spend a point to say "There's a pharmacy nearby that happens to be open at midnight." This is not tied to their character abilities; everyone can shape the gameworld.
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A whole lot of people who don't use pre-written adventures, would love to - if there were any that fit their play styles.
A call for "more adventures, fewer systems," does not fix that, doesn't acknowledge that some of the hostility toward modules is that many only fit one particular type of game.
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You could maybe say an "unexpected twist" is "the guards dodged being punched long enough to call for backup," but The Plan is supposed to account for that.
It doesn't account for "one of the guards is That Guy You Know," which "quest-adventure" games have no mechanical way to address.
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I could enjoy the "carefully plan out every move" approach to heists, and still agree that D&D is not designed for it.
Heists have the expectation that, if you have done the planning correctly, you will succeed. Chance of failure comes from unexpected twists - NOT whether you roll badly.
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Yeah, absolutely nobody thinks Honey Heist is the D&D killer.
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There are GMless games where this is not the case.
There are games with GMs where the players-of-characters specifically have the ability to affect the world - in Fate, they can spend a Fate point (or have a stunt that skips the cost) to create world details, and that's part of the main mechanics.
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If anyone is writing off an entire subsection of the hobby based on some rando's posts in social media arguments, they deserve to lose out on whatever they could otherwise get from that section of the hobby.
There's a limit to how much nuance I can cram into a skeet.
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I admit I don't know how flexible modules really are, because in 40+ years of gaming across many games and many groups, I have never been with a group that preferred modules to homemade settings. If they didn't eschew them entirely, they used them as the first game for a new system.
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We can adapt the modules to put those things in. We can alter them to include references to the module that was run last month, can adjust the encounters, enemies, treasure to connect to other modules or the history we've created.
At some point, however, it's less work to start from scratch.
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An adventure module can allow the player-made characters to be heroes.
A series of adventure modules is not, cannot be, written about my local group's favorite characters, is not written about a world that suits all of our preferences, does not have our favorite in-jokes.
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They mean the freedom to discriminate and exclude the people they don't like from the good things in life.
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All the groups I've known wanted to explore their own worlds, with their own characters as the heroes, and modules could never bring them that. Modules worked as a template but GMs built adventures to fit their players.
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They may have been THE way to play at conventions, but every group I have known - multiple decades, multiple, groups, multiple game types - was 90% or more self-made adventures.
An adventure or two may help players understand the designers' intentions for the game. A good way to get started.
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The other terms are indeed much blurrier and tell me very little about the game or the community that likes it.
"OSR" has been consistent - I have not liked anything widely claimed to be OSR, and have not enjoyed gaming with strong fans of OSR games.
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I continue to be annoyed at how relevant this still is:
medium.com/extra-extra/...